Words & Stuff

Back in column OOO, I wrote a fairly detailed discussion of ogham, an alphabet used in some contexts in ancient Ireland and elsewhere.

I recently came across a cute ogham transliterator tool online; you type in a sequence of letters, and it shows you what the ogham equivalent of that sequence would be.

This is not, of course, a translation tool. If you type in an English word, you’ll get the ogham characters corresponding to the letters of that word, but it probably won’t be a real word in any language that ogham was historically used for.

Still, a fun toy. And if you click the keyboard icon in the text-input field, it shows you the ogham letters and lets you click them to add them to the sequence.

P.S.: The Google Doodle for St. Patrick’s Day included a sequence of ogham letters; you can view that sequence in the transliterator to see what it said, though here again this is a transliteration, not a translation.